Withdrawing Cash from JonWoodGaming: I Can Finally Say “I’m a Winner”

I had my doubts about whether I was ever going to do it. But I did it. I actually cashed out money from JonWoodGaming. $300 to be precise. How sweet it is.

Not all of what I cashed out was winnings, however, since withdrawing money at JWG required that I deposit $25 and then play 4x this amount of money. So of the $300, only $275 was profit. Not too shabby, given that I started with a $5 no-deposit bonus. I can’t crow too much since much of my winnings was due to an error with their program. I figure I legitmately earned about half.

I used Neteller to make the $25 deposit. In order to do this I first needed to make a deposit from my bank account into Neteller. Neteller charges %8.9 commission to make such a transaction, which cost me a couple of bucks.

Although everything went smoothly with the transaction, I get kind of nervous giving sites like Neteller (and poker sites like Party and bodog) my bank account information. What stops these sites from just taking all my money without my permission? If they were to do this I couldn’t do anything to get my money back. I’m going to my bank today to see if I have any protection from this. I’ll let you know.

It took a few days to get my money from JWG – it is in my Neteller account – but after I made the initial withdrawl request, I received an email from Jon Wood, founder of JWG. At first, I thought he was going to explain why I couldn’t keep the money. But it turned out that he was just writing to let me know that if I had any concerns or problems with getting the money that I requested I should email him directly. Pretty stand-up guy.

I expressed my appreciation for this gesture and told him how I enjoyed playing at his site. I also told him that if he was interested in some constructive criticism about his site that I had some to give. He emailed me back and said that he was interested in what I had to say.

So I gave him about 4 ways the site could be improved. He wrote back and said the site is still in development, that problems were being worked on, and that he would pass along my suggestions to the appropriate people. I thought that this was quite commendable, though I haven’t seen any of my ideas implemented yet.

I still have about $126 in my account at JWG and I still enjoy playing at the site, though lately I’ve been playing almost all the time at Hold’em Poker (I’ll explain more about this in a later post).

The main reason I like playing poker at JWG is that it moves very slowly compared with every other poker room I’ve played at, and I’ve played at close to a dozen poker rooms. The slowness gives slow thinkers like me more of an opportunity to mull over hands.

The slowness also contributes to the friendly atmosphere in the rooms in that it gives players the chance to chat. I don’t do a lot of chatting, but since there aren’t too many players at JWG (I would guess around 30 who play for real money), I’ve come to “know” several of the regulars, and so I sometimes feel comfortable to chat about hands that I’ve played or even about what other players do for a living. Yes, there iss the occasional jerk or altercation. But, overall, I’ve experienced mostly pleasant and civil people.